“It was as romantic revolt rather than social critique that situationism survived in this country. Its principal anglophone representative was the writer Alexander Trocchi, whose novels of disaffected hipsterdom (notably Cain's Book) owe more to William Burroughs and the Beats than they do to, say, Bakunin. Today, Trocchi's influence is felt in the obsessive pamphleteering of the poète maudit Stewart Home, who revived Rumney's London Psychogeographical Association in the early 90s and continues to pledge his allegiance to ‘non-Debordist situationism’. And a vestigial folk memory of situationist dérive (‘street ethnography’ Wark calls it), as it was practised by Debord and his lettrist comrade Ivan Chtcheglov in Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the 50s, is preserved in the literary peregrinations of Iain Sinclair and Will Self, where psychogeography is parlayed into a kind of Blakean metropolitan mysticism.
“The British situationists of the late 60s thought Debord and the others had taken a wrong turn. SI apostate Christopher Gray, whose band of London-based provocateurs King Mob included the future Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, opined: ‘What they [Debord et al] gained in intellectual power and scope they had lost in terms of the richness and verve of their own everyday lives.’ The SI, Gray argued, ‘turned inward’. ‘Cultural sabotage’ and ‘drunken exuberance’ had been replaced by theoretical austerity.
“But that turning inward didn't prevent the Parisian situationists from exerting the most profound influence on the French student movement in May 1968. More than 300,000 copies were printed of a pamphlet, On the Poverty of Student Life, written by an SI cadre named Mustapha Khayati. And it was a protégé of Debord's, René Viénet, who was responsible for some of the more memorable of the graffiti that appeared all over Paris during that tumultuous month – including the one Wark has taken for the title of his book.”
@The Guardian
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